As we head into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and retail’s peak season for 2018, I wanted to reflect back on some excitement we had earlier in the year at Wayfair; specifically how we reacted and built, as a tech team, toward challenges we hadn’t seen before. I hope other e-commerce…

Here at Wayfair, we are faced with challenges that the average iOS developer likely never has to come across. In the last eight months, we’ve had 47 different developers make 2,000 commits into our repository. Over the past six years, this monumental amount of changes has led to a codebase…

Moving a couch across multiple countries to land in your living room, a couple of days after placing an order, is a challenging business. The Transportation Engineering team at Wayfair, who look after the transportation portion of our logistics, knows this all too well. This capability has given us a…

Something we often emphasize on our teams here at Wayfair is that ideas could and should come from everywhere. It is important that every individual, not just our business owners, product managers, and designers, are thinking about our work in the context of the overall the customer experience. When it…

As Wayfair’s business has scaled, so too has the size of our engineering teams – not to mention the complexity of the software features we’re building. At the same time, moving quickly in the global tech landscape has never mattered more. As a modern tech company, one simply cannot afford…

The Wayfair iOS app aims to have complete feature-parity with our website. This means that we need to support a variety of screen sizes and orientations in ways that — at least from an iOS frameworks point-of-view — are “custom”. To be specific, we need to support three distinctly different…

Early in 2017, Wayfair made the decision to adopt React as our primary frontend framework of choice. Rather than cover the reasons why we chose React, more interestingly, we’d like to focus on some of the architecture challenges we faced during the conversion. When the project officially commenced in June…

Kotlin… Developers are clamoring for it. Some are calling it the future of Android Development. Others are claiming it lacks the tooling to make it “production” ready. At Wayfair, we decided to give Kotlin a try and come to our own conclusions. Initially, we used it for our “debug” features….

In the Wayfair Network Operations Center (NOC) we wear a lot of hats: Code Deployers, Debuggers, Production Triage, and Incident Coordination, to name a few. Just this month we’ve responded to an average of 256 alerts a day and are staffed 24×7 with a team spanning two continents, servicing several…

Jack Wood and I, CIO and Chief Architect of Wayfair, spoke at Stackdive, at Wayfair’s on April 23. Here’s the matching blog post we published on the Stackdive site, now crossposted here. Jack and I are both long-time software guys who now spend somewhat less of our time thinking about what to build,…

Wayfair Engineering places special emphasis on software testing as a means of maintaining stability in production. The DevTools team, which I am a member of, has built and integrated a number of tools into our development and deploy process in order to catch errors as early as possible, especially before…